Page 55 of Rune’s Solace

“No, I—” I stared up at the dark ceiling, turning it over. “Nobody’s asked me that in a long time.”

So I told her.

Not about the plants. She’d worked that garden beside me long enough to know where most of those came from. I told her the rest, the parts I’d never handed anybody: that my mother was the kind of woman who’d sit all night with somebody else’s sick kid and never once think to doctor herself, that my father rode with the club back when it was rotten clear through and stayed gone more than he stayed home, and that she wouldn’t leave him. Not for anything. Not once. Didn’t matter what it cost her.

I told Amy I’d patched into that same club at nineteen for one reason, and it wasn’t brotherhood. I wanted to be close enough to keep an eye on my mother.

Then I told her about the last year.

About brewing things that didn’t work and reading every book I could get my hands on, digging through my mother’s own notebooks and mixing what she’d written down, changing one thing and then another like maybe the right combination was hiding somewhere and I just hadn’t been smart enough to find it yet. I told her what it was to watch a woman who’d spent her life fixing everybody else go slow in a house with the curtains drawn while the man who’d promised to love her was off doing whatever the hell he was doing.

“I couldn’t fix her,” I said to the ceiling. “I’ve fixed damn near everybody who’s come through that door since. Dug bullets out of men. Set bones. Got Chain breathing again on my kitchen floor.” I swallowed against something that hadn’t gotten easier in all these years. “Couldn’t fix the one that mattered.”

Amy didn’t say anything for so long I thought she’d fallen asleep.

Then, softly, from the bed, “That’s why.”

“That’s why what.”

“The garden.” Her voice was thick, half-asleep and she didn’t know what she was doing to me. “That’s why you never once let a thing grow out there just to be pretty. Everything’s got a job.” A pause. “You’re still trying to save her.”

I lay there on the floor of my cabin and couldn’t speak.

“That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,” she said, and then she was asleep, I stayed awake till dawn, because nobody in thirty-five years had looked at that garden and seen what it was meant to be.

* * *

By the third week, the cabin had become dangerous in a different way.

Devil had sat me down in his office and told me plain that a wall didn’t get to have hands, and I’d understood him. She was scared, I was the thing standing closest, and there were lines a man didn’t get to blur just because he loved the woman on the other side of them.

So I didn’t touch her. Not the way I wanted to. Problem was, nobody’d said a damn thing about looking. I’d stopped being able to look at her mouth, which was inconvenient as hell because apparently Amy did everything with it. Bit the corner when she was thinking. Pressed her lips together when she was trying not to laugh at me. Licked tea off the bottom one without knowing she was doing it and nearly sent me out into the garden twice in one week.

She wasn’t doing any of it for me.

That made it worse.

And somewhere in there, she started looking too.

I’d catch her eyes on my hands when I rolled my sleeves up, or on my chest when I came in from the garden with my shirt stuck to me from the heat. Once I caught her looking at my mouth and her eyes snapped away so fast she damn near hurt herself, and I spent the next hour sitting on that floor trying not to grin like some sixteen-year-old fool who’d just figured out a girl liked him.

Neither one of us said a word about any of it.

Didn’t need to.

She’d hand me a cup, our fingers would brush, and I’d feel that little bit of contact all the way up my arm; then I’d look at her and catch the same hitch in her, the tiny pause before she pulled away, and we’d both go right back to pretending tea was the most interesting thing happening in the room.

Three weeks of that will do something to the air.

By then, that cabin had gotten so full of wanting you could’ve struck a match to it.

* * *

And under all of it. Under every good hour. Under the toothbrush, the tea and the girl asleep in my bed with her hand in my shirt.

I knew what her father did to her.

Brenda told me everything. Took her fifty minutes, and she cried damn near all fifty while I stood in that room and didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, just listened while the instinct to kill ran through me. She used the plain words for it because Brenda’s not a woman who dresses things up, and I haven’t slept through a night since.